Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

He set off at a crawl, following his own bloody trail of palm prints.

He was halfway down the stairs when he saw in front of him a pair of wet brown legs. He looked up. Cacho brought the butt of his pistol down on his head.

He sent up Manco first, then climbed aboard himself. He saw immediately that there was no hope of extinguishing the fire. Cacho was standing proudly over the semi-conscious billonario , holding two pistols on him, one of them a Colt.45 he did not recognize.

The billonario was very pale, even for a gringo. He was bleeding from the head and-what happened to his hands? Look at them. The bushy eyebrows gave him a fierce look, even in this state.

He leaned over him and said, " Billonario , where is the painting?"

The eyes opened. Blinked and peered.

"Where is the Manet?"

Cacho, seeking to please his patron , kicked the old man in the ribs to prompt him to answer. Niño hit Cacho in the throat with his own pistol, knocking him into a Mihanovic painting of a rowboat. Cacho gagged, clutching his Adam's apple.

" Billonario ," he said gently, "tell me. Where is the Manet?"

"Upstairs. Over the bar." He seemed almost pleased to get it over with.

He bounded up the stairs and looked about. The teak deck was-there was a strange, bloody trail-hand prints. He followed them to the bar and looked up.

There it was. He stood, unable to move. It was magnificent. Give the billonario his due. On a lot of boats like this it would be a Leroy Neiman up there, or some idiotic nautical doggerel about the bar being closed for five minutes a day.

It was the Baudelaire "Absinthe Drinker" and no mistake. Baudelaire's pupils were dilated, looking directly at him, fixing him with the mad, ecstatic eyes of the lotus eater, absintheur , laudanum drinker, hashish eater: " I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me. " Manet had caught all!

He took a step toward the blazing, orchidaceous eyes, but found his own drawn to the frame. There was blood on it. Blood was dripping from the painting. Something was sparkling in the blood. Gold?

He turned, ran and dove down the stairs a half second before the explosion.

The shaman sat in front of the lifeless stone, murmuring as he mixed his brew of ginger, nightshade, tobacco water and ayahuasca . Eladio and Zacari sat watching him at a distance. Inancia's new child cried inside a hut. At the edge of the village the dogs tore at the head of a peccary.

He finished mixing his brew, set the frothy gourd aside and began to blow over the surface of the stone.

Zacari whispered to his father, "That's a lot of bikut ." He grinned. "He's going to have great visions."

Eladio said, "That is what I fear." Eladio had never told Zacari what took place many years before, when the tribe lived to the north, along the Rio Mayo. Eladio was fishing one day in the dugout when he heard the cries of a young girl. He ran to the source of the sound and saw the shaman forcing himself into Ampuya, a young girl of the village he was holding, bent over a log. She was not yet of age. She screamed. The shaman shouted at her to be quiet, that he was driving out an evil tsentsak . Eladio knew to be afraid of the shamans knew that they possessed great powers. He hid in the bush and watched in terror as the shaman brought his club down on the girl's head and broke it open; watched as he continued his work on Ampuya's lifeless body.

He ran back to the canoe and returned to the village. His father had been killed in a battle with the Tikuna. He told his mother what he had seen. She took him into the forest and shook him until his insides loosened, shouting at him that a pasuk had entered his body and given him an evil vision. She told him never to tell what he had seen, or the shaman would summon the wawek tunchi , the sorcerer.

But Ampuya, who had gone into the forest to gather warok berries, never returned. The men of the tribe searched until they found her body, half eaten. That night the shaman drank bikut and had visions of what had happened to her. She had been carried off by an iwanch and given to wild pigs.

Years later, after Eladio had come of age, another girl disappeared. The search lasted for days. Eladio was the most skilled hunter of the tribe. It was he who found her, buried, who saw on the body the signs. He reburied her and remained by her grave for five days and nights without taking food or water, dreaming of Tsewa, the ancient headman of the spider monkeys, who had taught his people the secrets of the hunt. On the sixth day an ajutap appeared to him in the form of a jaguar and spoke to him.

He found what he sought a half day later, sunning itself in a warm spot. The jararaca is very swift, but Eladio was pure from fasting and moved with speed greater than the snake's, catching it with his hand at the base of the skull.

He returned to the village that night and entered the shaman's hut without noise and found the pinig bowl from which he drank his bikut . He held the snake's mouth to the rim of the bowl and milked forth the waxy yellow venom. He took the snake back into the forest and asked its forgiveness for stealing from it and released it.

The next night the shaman mixed his bikut and drank it to have a vision of what had become of the girl, Chipa. He began to gasp and shudder and cry out. The tribe thought he was having a great vision, and would not approach him as he lay writhing on the ground by the fire.

Only Eladio approached. For this he was thought very brave.

He leaned over the shaman's ear and whispered, "It is my iwanch that kills you, old man." The shaman died. Eladio became headman of the tribe.

Now he watched the shaman drink from his bowl and shout at the lifeless stone. He signaled Zacari to walk with him down to the river. They sat in the branches of a wampusb tree, out of reach of crocodiles. Eladio had many wives and sons, but he loved Zacari best because he was the oldest.

"Tell me," he said, "why do you think the life has gone out of the stone?"

Zacari answered all his father's questions with questions, out of respect.

"Because the tsugki inside has fled?" He smiled at his father. "Because the tsugki feeds on the gold-and-black things the kurinku pataa tied to the side of it before he gave it to us?"

Eladio was pleased. "The gold-and-black things are empty."

Zacari leaned over the bough they were sitting on and spat into the water. A piranha dimpled the surface where it landed. "The shaman will tell us a vision."

"Trust only your own visions." Eladio stood. "They have these gold-and-black things at Yenan. I have seen them. Go there and tell El Niño we need some. Tell him the white men were not pistacos ."

"With respect, Papi, how do you know?"

" Pistaco carries a knife, not guns, and a lasso made of human skin. He wears hair on his face. Tell El Niño that we killed most of them out of respect. Tell him to give us gold-and-black things. Take Kipu with you."

"Yes, Papi. What will you do?"

"I will stay here and watch the shaman. His vision may tell him to sacrifice Inancia's baby."

"What will you do if that is his vision?"

"As Tsewa tells me," said Eladio.

Diatri watched the oil streak along the window. He leaned forward and shouted at the Marine pilot, "What's with the oil?"

The pilot shouted back, "These planes are pieces of shit."

"How come we're in them?"

"Realism. It's what they fly. Reason they got such fuckin' long noses on them is they're always crapping out and the long noses gives you extended glide ratio so you can land on the fuckin' water, if you can find it."